Challenge Responses
by SisterDear
Summary: Detective Conan, Magic Kaito challenge responses. Will be mostly unrelated oneshots.


Disclaimer: they're not mine.

Apotoxin challenge: either someone odd receives it or the apotoxin has strange results. Am still beating off the plunies that want to make this one longer.

Kaitou Kid, Edogawa Conan, Hakuba Saguru, no pairings

OoOoO

The shocked silence that rang through the courtyard was louder than any gunshot could have ever hoped to be.

Conan's feet kicked in before his brain did. He raced across the courtyard, Kid a white blur in the corner of his eye as the thief fired his cardgun at a shadow disappearing over the courtyard wall.

The shadow gave a muffled yelp of pain just before dropping out of view.

Conan and Hakuba had realized at the same moment what Kid was up to; had both raced ahead to this out-of-the-way courtyard just off the ground floor of tonight's heist location. The rest of the taskforce was nowhere to be seen, no doubt still chasing Kid's decoy into the upper stories of the building.

He hadn't heard any gunshots, hadn't seen any muzzle flash. Hakuba simply jerked, slapped at his shoulder, and went down.

He reached Hakuba's side just as the other detective's body started to steam.

OoOoO

"I thought it was administered through a pill?"

"How did you know that?" Kid smiled enigmatically. Conan shook his head, no longer all that surprised when Kid revealed things he shouldn't know. "It was."

"Hm." Kid held up the dart he'd pulled from an unsettlingly still Hakuba's shoulder. He'd reached the detective's side just after Conan. And as the boy detective had hesitated, suddenly feeling a wave of trepidation, the thief simply reached out and plucked a tiny dart from Hakuba's shoulder.

_Three. This makes three. Ai, myself, and now Hakuba-san. _

_Dammit. _

And he couldn't do anything… well, almost nothing. _I need to contact Ai. _

Hakuba's body was being rapidly enveloped in a white mist. Conan reached forward, hesitated, and scooted back. He was a little leery of inhaling that steam. A slight motion from Kid had Conan nearly jumping out of his skin. The dart had vanished. Conan frowned. "Why are you still here?"

"We should get out of the open, Tantei-kun," Kid said in non-reply. The thief flicked a wrist and Conan twitched again, but the only thing that appeared was a large handkerchief, which Kid quickly tied over his mouth and nose. Conan's brain finally kicked back in when Kid started to reach towards Hakuba. His hand flew to his wristwatch.

Kid paused. Keeping his hands in plain sight, perfectly still—not that this fooled Conan for a moment into thinking that he was helpless—he said, "Considering the circumstances, might we call a temporary truce?"

The cloudy steam around Hakuba's body was thick enough to hide the teenage detective completely from view.

No one on the taskforce knew what had happened to Shinichi. None of them would have any idea what was happening to Hakuba now. Of the people nearby, only he and Kid had any clue about what was going on… and Conan was too small to easily move the unconscious detective out of the open.

"Fine. Just until he's safe." Or as safe as anyone targeted by the Black Organization could be.

The steam already seemed to be tapering off. Conan frowned. He'd been unaware during most of his own initial transformation, but this seemed a bit quick.

Kid leaned down wordlessly, grunting slightly as he lifted the detective. Conan debated the wisdom of turning his back on the pair, but in this case the greater danger was the one he couldn't see, the one who could still be in the shadows just beyond the courtyard wall. He jogged ahead to open the door, for which he received a polite nod of thanks.

Inside, Kid stopped along a blank stretch of wall with some distance from the windows. The phantom thief was frowning. He set Hakuba down, waving a hand through the thinning steam. Conan blinked.

Hakuba didn't look any smaller.

What if that dart hadn't contained the apotoxin? Conan had seen the steam starting to rise from Hakuba's body, recalled vague memories of white mist and wracking pain, and assumed Hakuba had been hit with the same thing in a different form. But what if it wasn't?

He was still breathing. With his head lolling back the way it was, Conan could see the pulse beating in his neck. Hakuba looked perfectly normal, as though he'd been hit with nothing worse than sleeping gas... but tranquilizer darts didn't cause steam like that.

Conan's fingers itched. Kid was right there, right next to a prone and unconscious fellow detective, but the miniature detective kept back. His best defenses- his darts and his shoes- worked better with some range, should Kid try to pull something.

"How long did it take for you to go chibi?"

Conan scowled at the light jab. "I don't know. I was unconscious."

Voices echoed out of the stairwell at the other end of the room, Nakamori's cursing predominant among them; the taskforce was coming back. Kid stood.

"That is my cue to leave," he said, voice abruptly shifting out of its deadly serious tone. "You can have the pleasure of deciding how much to tell the taskforce. The dart is in your pocket." The thief's visible eye darted back towards the still-unconscious detective. "Try not to let him get shot again before he wakes up, if you please."

Then Kid was gone.

OoOoO

Conan told the taskforce only that he'd seen Hakuba fall, that Kid had driven the attacker off, and that the phantom thief had been the one to pull the dart from Hakuba's neck. He didn't mention that the dart had been dropped into one of his own pockets before Kid disappeared.

When Hakuba woke up less than an hour later, looking and sounding none the worse for the wear, it was assumed that he'd merely been hit with a sleeping drug.

Conan took the dart to Ai. She told him it would be at least a week before she had any conclusive results and made it quite clear that if he planned on telling Hakuba anything even remotely related to the Black Organization, she was to be left out of it.

As it turned out, the decision of exactly how much should be revealed to Hakuba soon became irrelevant.

OoOoO

A bare four days later, there was another heist. Once again, Conan and Hakuba were both there, and once again they'd both figured out Kid's game and raced ahead of the taskforce.

Conan hadn't actually spoken to the other detective so far this evening. He'd had some trouble getting past Ran and had barely arrived on time, but he'd seen Hakuba disappear into a stairwell even as he dashed up his own. They both led to the roof. Hakuba might actually beat him there, having the advantage of longer legs.

He burst through a door, too keyed up on adrenaline to shiver in the cool night air. Yes, there was Hakuba, yelling irately, and there was Kid, laughing in response. The detective was on the ground, furiously trying to unknot the string of handkerchiefs tangled around his ankles.

Conan ran past the detective, intent on getting Kid in range of his darts before the thief reached the edge of the building.

He never got there. As he passed by Hakuba, a strange, familiar tremor ran through his body and he stopped short, not two feet away from the 'older' detective. Hakuba stopped yelling, a strange expression coming over his face before he twitched, body twisting in discomfort rather than anger. Kid paused as well, turning to check on the sudden silence.

Moments later, it was not Edogawa Conan and Hakuba Saguru side by side in the middle of the roof. Instead, Kudo Shinichi stood next to a six year old blond wearing Hakuba's much-too-large clothes.

Fin

OoOoO

Don't know why Hakuba got hit… maybe he just had the misfortune to end up in front of the real target. (Be it Kid or Conan.)


End file.
